My Role is to Put Rubanda’s Needs in the Budget-Minister Musasizi

By Wilfred Arinda Nshekantebirwe

On Sunday afternoon, the Minister for Finance, Planning and Economic Development, Hon Henry Musasizi stood at Ikumba Health Centre III in Rubanda District and said something that most politicians in Uganda rarely say, and mean.

He told the gathering assembled at Ikumba Health Centre III to receive him,  that he did not want flowers. He did not want banana plants . He did not want the ceremonial welcomes and the elaborate gestures of honour that routinely accompany a Minister’s visit to his home district. He wanted something harder to give and far more valuable to receive.

“I do not seek recognition as a Minister simply by being welcomed with flowers and banana plants.. Emitumba,” he said. “I want you to demonstrate my importance only when Rubanda District’s needs are addressed in the National Budget. That is the highest value I attach to my position as a Minister coming from this District.”

It was the kind of statement that cuts through the noise of Ugandan political culture, a culture in which the arrival of a Minister in his constituency is often measured by the size of the welcoming crowd, the length of the ululations, and the grandeur of the reception rather than the weight of what the Minister has actually delivered. Musasizi was rejecting that measurement entirely and replacing it with one that is harder to fake, results in the budget.

For a man who has spent his first months in office telling his Ministry team to shift from spending money to enforcing results, telling Parliament to measure development by lives transformed rather than projects approved, and telling the World Bank that a 32 percent disbursement rate is not good enough, the statement at Ikumba was entirely consistent. It was a Finance Minister applying to himself the same standard of accountability he has been demanding from everyone else.

On the Parish Development Model, Hon Musasizi announced that over four trillion Uganda shillings has been disbursed through the PDM, with each parish having received at least four hundred million shillings. Four trillion shillings already in the system, sitting in parishes, in SACCOs, in the hands of individuals who are supposed to be using it to enter the money economy and build productive livelihoods.

The PDM sits alongside other existing programmes, the Youth Livelihood Program and the Uganda Women Entrepreneurship Program among them, in a constellation of government initiatives designed to move Ugandans from subsistence into commercial economic activity. Hon Musasizi was clear that the money is there. What is now needed, he told MPs and district leaders assembled at Ikumba, is vigilance. He asked them to monitor the utilisation of the funds and to continue guiding beneficiaries in how the money is being used. The disbursement has happened. The accountability must now follow.

But perhaps the most significant disclosure Musasizi made at Ikumba was about a conversation he had recently held with President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. The two men have been discussing the PDM, and the plan that has emerged from those discussions is to increase PDM funding for bigger parishes, once government has established precisely how many such parishes exist.

It is a signal that the programme is not static, that its architecture is being actively reviewed at the highest level, and that the envelope of funding available to parishes could grow significantly in the next budget cycle.

###